The Young Prompt Engineers

ACMer

2 years ago

My sons were excited to show me the Text to Image feature using Microsoft Bing. They said they accidentally found this feature at Edge Browser the Toolkis vertical bar on the right. The Microsoft Bing has a “Image Creator” which allows you describe what to draw.

Prompt engineering is a concept in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly natural language processing (NLP). In prompt engineering, the description of the task that the AI is supposed to accomplish is embedded in the input, e.g. as a question, instead of it being implicitly given. Prompt engineering typically works by converting one or more tasks to a prompt-based dataset and training a language model with what has been called “prompt-based learning” or just “prompt learning”.

Prompt engineering is a comprehensive process that encompasses the entire cycle of interaction between humans and the AI. It involves deliberate and systematic design and refinement of prompts and underlying data structures to manipulate AI systems towards achieving specific and desired outputs.

As ChatGPT is become a hot topic (ChatGPT-3.5, ChatCPT-4 or even ChatGPT-5), the “Prompt Engineering” is on demand. The AI has evolved, and we need to be able to give specific tasks, precise requirements (to the point), to the AI so that it can accompolish the task. Many job functions/roles require the skills of “Prompt Engineering”.

No matter what job functions, many can become a Prompt Engineer sometime in their career path. A Software Engineer requires the skill of “Prompt Engineering” in particular, for example, a Bing Search Engine with ChatGPT can replace StackOverflow. The ChatGPT is also good to generate a boiler-plate code to help shorten the amount of development efforts.

We probably don’t need to learn how to solve complex tasks in Excel Spreadsheet anymore as this can be done by just talking to ChatGPT which is included in Microsoft 365. Also, with a single or a few lines of sentences, we can ask AI to create a professional PPT (Powerpoint Slides) within seconds. All these require “Prompt Engineer” skills.